Page:The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton.djvu/40

 THE LIFE OF MILTON

��phorus or the Fire-bringer, and Samson Hybristes or Samson Marrying, were among the subjects pencilled in his note-book in 1642. At that time Samson had apparently engaged his attention no more deeply than other Bible heroes whose names occur in his notes ; but events had gradually been shaping his life into such a form that it now found in Samson's story its sufficient prototype and symbol. No hint escapes the poet that the many-sided correspondence of his own case with that of his hero is in his mind ; the treatment is throughout sternly objective, even sculpturesque in its detachment ; but the autobiographic meaning is everywhere latent, giving to the most restrained lines an ominous emphasis and to the least significant a strange kind of wintry passion. He too had been a champion favored of the Lord, and had matched his giant strength against the enemies of his people. He had sent the fire-brands of his pamphlets among their corn, and slain their strongest with simple weapons near at hand. He too had taken a wife from among the worshippers of Dagon ; he had made festival with her people over the nuptials which brought him a loss as tragic as Samson's, the loss of human tenderness, a lowered ideal, and a warped understanding of the deepest human relationships. Now, blind and fettered in the midst of an idolatrous generation, he may well have longed for another Salmasius upon whom to wreak, as Samson upon Harapha of Gath, the energy which still swelled his veins. In another year or two, when Dryden should " tag his verses," and transform his august epic into a trivial opera, he would be brought like Samson to make sport before the Philistines, as a juggler or a mime. Perhaps he might still hope, bowing his head in prayer to the God of the spirit, to bring down the temple builded by the men of the Restoration to the gods of the flesh, and bury in the ruins all the insolence and outrage of the times. With some such autobiographic second intention in mind as this, one must read the gray pages of Samson Agonistes. It offers perhaps the most remarka- ble instance in all art of an artist's personal story revealed by impersonal symbols, set forth in their traditional integrity, unmanipulated to any private end.

Milton had three more years to live after the publication of his last poems. His daughters had a year before been put out to learn, Phillips says, " some curious and ingenious sorts of manufacture that are proper for women to learn, particularly embroideries in gold and silver ; " and he was left alone in the house in Bunhill Fields with his young wife Elizabeth, of whom he seems to have been fond. The publication of Paradise Lost had again made him a figure of some note, visited by persons of distinction. The most interesting of these visits was that made by Dryden, for the purpose of asking permission to put Paradise Lost into rhyme, as a kind of sacred opera. The value of rhyme over blank verse, for heroic pur- poses, had been the main contention of Dryden's Essay on Dramatic Poetry, and the publication of the epic shortly after had been a powerful practical manifesto on Milton's part of his opposed opinion. This difference of artistic theory only serves to emphasize the fundamental differences between the two men, spokesmen and champions of antipodal creeds. Their trivial meeting takes on a kind of moral picturesqueness when we think of them in their typical characters, the militant

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